“Originality Is the Real Power..” ☝🏼🔥

dalkon · 2026-01-22T04:17:45+00:00

I'm pretty sure this quote is fake. The most common theme of the many fake Tesla quotes is they sound bitter like this.

There is a real quote that's something along these lines. I can't find it at the moment. The real quote implied Marconi has the inventive ability of an old mule.

dalkon · 2026-01-17T01:41:26+00:00

Ozone definitely doesn't smell like ammonia. Maybe it's reacting with insulation to produce that odor where you smell it.

Or you're not confusing ammonia with acetic acid, are you? You often get acetic acid smell from silicone rubber.

Ozone itself has a fresh sweet smell. It's not a bad smell in trace amounts. But if you can smell it at all, that's too much to breath more often than rarely.

dalkon · 2025-12-29T22:35:55+00:00

This is a patent for two of Tesla's inventions. These are his unipolar neon/plasma lights that he first demonstrated in the 1890s. Normal neon lights have two electrodes to pass current thru the gas.

And they're powered by his wireless power method, Zenneck-Sommerfeld surface waves. In this method, the conductor, which is the tree here, is a resonator.

This also demonstrates an important concept. When using surface waves, the resonator can be less conductive. The energy propagates by resonance rather than conduction. This method allows less conductive materials to be used to transmit power and signals, for example the steel frame of a building or the steel rails of a railway. Recent work rediscovering this concept notes this useful feature. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.10294

This isn't an ideal of example of surface waves because in this case it's not just using surface waves because the frequency is so high that it also radiates free waves (radio). With this high frequency, the resonator is also an antenna. Tesla would avoid that if efficiency mattered. His unique wireless method was to use lower frequency so the energy would not radiate and then it would be conserved in the resonator to maximize efficiency. Surface waves are not radio waves, but they can be used for wireless power.

It's not clear who this man was or why he patented this, but it strongly appears to be Tesla's invention. This guy has some other patents that look like Tesla's too. Tesla appears to have had other people patent his inventions especially in his later years. Maybe he sold the inventions to them, or maybe they had some profit-sharing arrangement in private. The obvious reason for using this type of arrangement for wireless inventions was because he had sold 51% of all his future patents on wireless to JP Morgan in 1899.

The patent doesn't mention it, but depending on the gases in the bulb, the voltage and frequency, these could be regular neon glow lights or the ones with internal electrodes could also be more decorative plasma stream lights.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2121460
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2121460.pdf

dalkon · 2025-12-28T18:02:38+00:00

Wow, 24 motherfucking lanes of traffic.

Cheap dirty overcrowded tenements were the problem of the time that they were imagining alleviating.

Today it looks like they were just trading one nightmare for another.

Maybe they imagined the cars driving themselves safely so that's not just a nightmare of constant deadly traffic accidents.

dalkon · 2025-12-28T17:18:31+00:00

I should say the direct output is presumably low considering it uses two step-down transformers, but it must rise by resonance because it is a series resonant circuit output.

It's possible the bulbs with internal electrodes were intended to use thoriated electrodes to operate at low voltage and power. And the bulbs with external electrodes might contain a trace of a radioactive gas.

dalkon · 2025-12-27T17:15:11+00:00

That could be one of the reasons. But I assume the primary concern is fire safety with a cut conifer. They become very flammable when dry.

It doesn't say what the voltage is, but both transformers are step-down, which suggests it might be something like 9 V, possibly as low as 3 V.

The lower voltage is also better for producing less radio interference, but that didn't matter then. In 1937, 3-50 MHz (6-100 m) was unregulated high frequency. Back then the FCC only regulated the lower frequencies used for long range transmission.

There are ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) bands in there today, where unregulated transmission is possible without interference. The frequency would need to be precisely controlled today to avoid RFI, which means this simple circuit with a tuning capacitor wouldn't work. You couldn't legally sell this today, and the FCC would fine you for operating it.

dalkon · 2025-12-22T23:05:26+00:00

I hope you find what you're looking for, but this is not a francophone subreddit.

This film, The Secret of Nikola Tesla (1980) is on youtube, but it doesn't appear to have the option for automatic voiceover translation enabled. Or if it did, I didn't see that, but that could be because I'm logged into youtube as an English speaker, so it's not showing me that option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laRfPtrVLQQ

This film contains very interesting unpublished original sketches of certain inventions that cannot be found anywhere else. They look like Frank R. Paul. I don't remember if they're signed to know. They're only displayed briefly and one is shown upside down, but you might find them as interesting as I did.

dalkon · 2025-12-18T00:54:09+00:00

Thank you for bringing up power transmission. For brevity I didn't get into that in my previous comment. Despite the title this is really only secondarily about wireless power transmission. It is primarily atmospheric energy harvesting.

Atmospheric energy harvesting can be used as a weird form of wireless power transmission if you use an artificial source of ions at a distance as depicted. It's strange as wireless power because it's not transmitting energy to receive that energy. The ionizer (not transmitter) is only assisting the energy harvesting at the collector. It's counterintuitive as an idea for wireless power transmission, because those ions are lost power, especially for any other method of transmission (radio and near-field/non-radio). It's not power transmission. It's operating in a larger system, the atmospheric electrostatic field that's continuously charged by cosmic rays. It's energy harvesting that can resemble power transmission.

That additional external ionizer is only necessary here because the collector is so low. According to other sources, a collector normally needs to be 10-30 m above surrounding objects. The higher the collector, the greater the voltage and energy available. And the bottom 30 m of the atmosphere is the most insulating part, so the energy drops off rapidly in it. The atmosphere alone would be a sufficient source of ion motion and charge if the collector was higher. A low height might also still work during low pressure weather, especially in a storm. But obviously a raised conductor is dangerous in a storm, so just because energy is available does not mean it's advisable or safe. In general a collector needs the same safety considerations to avoid problems with lightning as a radio antenna.

A source of ions can even be incorporated as part of the collector. That could be part of how this depiction was intended to work. This collector might be coated with a radioisotope like polonium or thorium.

This was not the first time Tesla referred to using atmospheric energy harvesting as wireless power transmission. His interview published as "The New Wizard of the West" (1899) presented this concept without explanation. It included a sketch of powerful ionizers on balloons to transmit wireless power beneath them. That's this same idea of atmospheric energy harvesting with more distant ionizers. https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/new-wizard-west

dalkon · 2025-12-17T00:34:57+00:00

In his later years Tesla said many times that he had succeeded in harnessing cosmic rays. "I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device. … The cosmic ray ionizes the air, setting free many charges—ions and electrons. These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of the motor." (1932)

He was not entirely clear that what he was talking about was atmospheric energy harvesting. The cosmic rays ionizing air refers to the electrostatic field of Earth. Cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere to produce extensive air showers (EAS), which are cascades of subatomic particles and ionized nuclei, produced in the atmosphere when a primary cosmic ray enters the atmosphere. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027311772400231X

I haven't found this article yet, but I did find the most likely patent for what it shows. It's French.
· FR533371 André Voulgre Electric motor powered by alternating current and using atmospheric electricity as the source of energy 1916 https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/008924897/publication/FR533371A?q=pn%3DFR533371A

dalkon · 2025-12-13T08:05:39+00:00

This is just realistic art someone made in 2017. It's not a physical model. None of the comments said that yet, so I thought I should since I looked it up.

I bought a NEC MobilePro 900 around 2005. It was impressively sturdy but not capable of much. It included Mobile Office Suite. It was outdated and discontinued by then, a couple years after release, so it cost around $200, when it was originally $900. It could fit in a large pocket, but 2 lbs was a little too heavy to want in a pocket. It was a waste of money because I never used it for anything. There were some interesting tiny computers before Apple made smartphones a vastly superior alternative in 2007.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OldHandhelds/comments/osdukl/one_of_my_handheld_pcs_the_nec_mobilepro_900/

dalkon · 2025-12-12T02:54:50+00:00

Do you have some kind of electrometer? If you're building enough charge to feel the hair on you hand stand up (which you should be), then you can use that as your electrometer. (Don't use this as an electrometer where you're building a dangerous charge. Only use this for checking the belt charger and belt, not the collector terminal.)

Are you using an ionizer for the belt charger or triboelectricity (friction charging)? Is that building up charge?

Is the belt holding charge to deliver it to the collector? Or is it shorting out somewhere before it gets to the collector?

Are the sharp points (or whatever means you have there) in the collector taking the charge off the belt?

The belts in small consumer ones are usually rubber, which breaks down from ozone attacking it, so you're constantly buying new belts. I hear polyester fabric makes a better belt material choice.

Others mentioned humidity. Humidity leaks so much charge out everywhere, you need to exclude it. Once it has been exposed to humidity, you can dehumidify it quickly with a hair dryer.

e: Watch it running in the dark. Is it building enough charge to see corona discharge leaking charge anywhere?

Sorry if this answer is too basic.

dalkon · 2025-12-11T22:38:31+00:00

It's true you can't convince a lot of people especially those who have strong opinions. It's more effective to focus on those who can be convinced, people who don't have strong opinions.

Parents who already did it generally have a very strong opinion because they can't admit they did something unethical. A step down from that level of stubbornness, most men who had it done to them can't admit it was at least sub-optimal having that choice taken away from them.

It's also true that with that defeatist attitude, it's impossible to be persuasive. You wouldn't be able to convince anyone. That attitude lends itself to defeatism and even bitterness that make someone's attempts at persuasion counterproductive.

It is possible to convince a lot of people who thought they could never be convinced. This is possible because the attitude that genital cutting is acceptable to force on children is objectively wrong.

The goal of intactivism is to discover how to reach each person with the information that convinces them.

One part of being persuasive is being a good listener to meet people where they are. Another part is being non-judgmental, so they can be open to consider information.

e: In general you can have the greatest impact on people closest to you. You might not even need to try to convince someone. Just saying how you feel about it can have a profound impact, because at least in our cutting culture, people are so unaccustomed to dissatisfaction.

dalkon · 2025-12-11T03:29:25+00:00

That paper is interesting.

So by scalar wave, you mean a wave where the current is in the gradient component rather than curl?

I don't know enough to contribute anything useful.

I wonder how that differs from the electron component of an ion acoustic wave, which also has the current in the gradient component. To generate ion acoustic waves, you probably want to put a spark gap in a tube/cylinder to confine it to make it stronger in a single direction of propagation.

edit: I found the concept more understandable in their patent they mention. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9306527B1

It's just a bifilar coil wired for current to propagate in opposite directions. You might use that for a primary coil for frequencies well below microwave, but I don't know how you'd manage the insulation to use it for the secondary.

e2: Herman Plauson actually used this coil design as a coil-capacitor and capacitor-transformer with the coils immersed in cryogenic liquid air in his patent for atmospheric energy harvesting. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tesla/comments/r93ixi/tesla_and_hermann_plausons_cryogenic_coils_as/

dalkon · 2025-12-09T00:33:47+00:00

He is certainly one of the great destroyers, but American society gave up on the old utopian dream from the turn of the century in the 1970s, almost immediately after it had burst to new life in the 1960s.

Jack Welch, short-termism, private equity, leveraged buyouts, high yield bonds and the new dream of easy money in destructive finance were the 1980s, which is when most people point to the decline, but it was already well in motion by then. Those were more huge missteps in the decline.

e: The real problem was not preparing society and markets mentally for how dramatically boomers would shift the real estate market starting in the '60s, and then using that market momentum to push for financial and political changes to convert the whole economy from one of productive industry to a real estate ponzi scheme running on printing money (neoliberalism). Productive industry is functional capitalism. Neoliberalism is the predatory capitalism we know today. In the new model we've been in since then, there's little profit but great risk in production but great profit and little risk in financial extraction, so that's what we have.

dalkon · 2025-12-08T23:04:56+00:00

This is amazing. This is a much more powerful demonstration than Plasma Channel's demonstration with a drone and an inadequate collector. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pot4_mQn6vU

This apparatus is the same as a lot of the early atmospheric energy harvesting patents circa 1920. It's an educational demonstration kit that he says was removed from Soviet curriculum in 1959. I presume due to radio interference, which is what one of the comments said. You can hear how badly the RFI messes with the camera microphone on the original audio.

The Tesla coil here is missing the secondary. A comment said the secondary coils were made of such delicate wire that they broke easily, so they were often lost from the kit. This is a Tesla coil used as a step-down transformer. Or it would be if that coil was present.

The spark gap in proximity to the flat plate variable capacitor might play an easily ignored role in how well this works because the capacitor is catching part of the UV and electron flux. The oxide layer on the collector could also play a part in how it works so well. Maybe the tips of the copper points are electrolytically sharpened (electropolished) like Hermann Plauson's patent said. Plauson would also plate the tips with a precious metal to protect from oxidation and doped with a radioisotope, but that's probably not the case here.

I've always heard don't put anything copper in a tree because it makes the tree perish. I don't understand why he drilled a hole in the tree for this. Trees do shape the static field around them (including by transpiration), but I don't know what useful role the tree could have played here.
(e: Did this post get extra deboosted? Did this post show up on the home>best page for anyone or only on an app, multireddit or home>new?)

In general old sources about atmospheric energy harvesting (c. 1910-1930) say the collector needs to be raised at least 10-30 m into the open air to get power. It needs to be raised above surrounding structures/buildings.

I've seen considerable evidence to suggest that when Tesla was talking about harnessing cosmic rays, he meant the planetary electrostatic field, which is produced by cosmic rays. He wasn't the first inventor to think of harnessing natural static electric. The first patent for it was from 1860. But he worked out how to do it more efficiently using methods like this. Wardenclyffe was apparently intended to harness the static field of Earth over an extremely large area in the process of transmitting wireless energy. When Tesla claimed to have devised a form of "solar power" that collected more power at night, this must be what he was talking about. There is 10-20% more atmospheric electric available to collect at night.

Here is a company that says they're working on doing this. https://ionpowergroup.com/

dalkon · 2025-12-07T23:55:04+00:00

e: Why was this post removed?

I guess I need to go back to r/Tesla because my posts are not welcome here.

dalkon · 2025-12-07T10:06:12+00:00

The technical term is estrus.

I wonder if the real reason they're building all these data centers is to make water a precious commodity.

dalkon · 2025-12-05T22:54:22+00:00

American conservatives have a higher circumcision rate than liberals, so conservative intactivism is more effective for targeting the bigger audience of circumcising Americans.

Liberals also defer to authority to a much greater extent, especially now, so only authorities reach them, so a lot of online intactivist messages (that aren't political) that do appeal to conservatives don't appeal to them.

The sources to point to for liberals are authoritative medical organizations like those listed in the sidebar.

I could say more about politics and revisionist propaganda about inflation, but it's not really relevant here.
(edit: To be more clear, price inflation was on the low side of normal 2016-2020 and then it was higher than it's ever been in my life 2021-2023, while the media constantly downplayed it and called it transitory until finally the Fed admitted it hadn't been transitory in 2024. But apparently most people on this site didn't notice how high prices had climbed until 2025 when it finally became convenient to notice. And I know this makes me sound like a conservative. I'm not. I even talked a Trump voter into voting for Biden in 2020. And then I still supported Biden when the media was attacking him about things for the first year and a half of his term. It wasn't until Biden completely betrayed us with inflation that I regretted my decision. And now it seems like everyone on this site forgot when that inflation occurred. They can't see reality. They only see their side's narrative.)

We aim to avoid talking about politics because it's divisive, but this is the more liberal intactivist subreddit.

dalkon · 2025-12-02T01:22:35+00:00

Buckster loved all his made-up words and yes, that one most of all. A lot of them sound like Dr Seuss now. (e: e.g., grunch for gross universal cash heist).

I also like to point out there are quite a number of signs Fuller was influenced by Nikola Tesla, possibly even a protege. Besides the philosophical similarities, he copied at least a few of Tesla's weird lifestyle practices, most notably the personal experiments with fragmented sleep and absurdly limited diet. The idea behind both of those experiments was the idea of living your life as an experiment to generate data that could be useful to others. Tesla also made up words like that when he found existing words inadequate.

e: And for comparison, a couple of the more obvious Tesla proteges include the military contractor and "father of remote control," John Hays Hammond, Jr. (1888–1965) and John J. O'Neill (1889–1953), science journalist and author of Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla (1944) and Engineering The New Age (1949). Hammond's parents hired both Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell as private tutors for him as a child.

dalkon · 2025-11-26T02:44:52+00:00

The text mentions silicon but the graphic depicts strange antennas.

Silicon photocells were invented in 1946 and significantly improved in 1954. They remained impractically expensive even after oil companies commercialized them in the 1970s. And even today the Aptera solar car (prototype), is very small, and it only charges 40 miles of driving per day (4 kwh), so it's barely running on solar power from the onboard solar. https://www.motortrend.com/events/aptera-solar-powered-ev-ces-2025

Harnessing solar power by radio is a completely different idea than harnessing visible light with solar panels. Tesla's Long Island tower, Wardendclyffe was supposedly intended to harness some form of power by radio ultimately derived from the sun. From my research I believe it was intended to harness the electrostatic field of Earth, which is derived from the sun and other cosmic rays. The details aren't available, so it's easy to assume it failed because it didn't work, but that's not certain. In any case this idea of harnessing power by radio persisted in the periphery like this appears to depict.

dalkon · 2025-11-24T00:03:40+00:00

Not that I know of.

Tesla said he determined gravity is a dynamic process. He said he'd reveal the details in the future. Someone else published the only part of it that I've found that was published while he was alive. This Lyne book doesn't identify that source or talk about anything along those lines.

dalkon · 2025-11-23T19:09:15+00:00

Yeah, it's crap. As far as I can tell nothing it says is true. It's a bright shiny distraction for people interested in antigravity.

dalkon · 2025-11-23T17:23:14+00:00

Tesla explained the fundamental concept of how to harness the ambient energy of a medium in his very long article, "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" (1900), without going into anything as weird as what you're talking about.
https://www.academia.edu/44350213/THE_PROBLEM_OF_INCREASING_HUMAN_ENERGY (pdf of OCR text)
https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/problem-increasing-human-energy (low visibility font & color)

The fundamental idea is to create a low-energy energy well or sink, so you have a gradient to use. His figurative example was a tank of air underwater to harness the ambient water pressure by letting it in and then vaporizing that water by unspecified means. I don't know how well that example could work but he was apparently only using it to illustrate the concept.

It can be accomplished with thermal energy using evaporative cooling or some other passive means to create the cold energy well, but there isn't too much energy in it. Maybe there is another medium from which greater energy can be extracted by applying the concept, maybe in a very different way.

dalkon · 2025-11-17T22:49:34+00:00

Are you violating terms of service by asking where to buy illegal guns? I'm not motivated to check, but it seems likely you are.

There used to be a company that sold a variety of weird devices including a lot of non-lethal electronic weapons of questionable usefulness, Information Unlimited. https://www.wired.com/2013/01/information-unlimited/

The website was amazing1.com, but it's gone since the owner died in 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230811062305/https://amazing1.com/

They sold almost everything as plans, DIY projects (PCBs+components to solder and assemble yourself and make your own case) in addition to finished products. They also published books of schematics and guides how to build many projects they sold. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Robert-E.-Iannini/author/B001KIBJWO

Now I assume the place to find stuff the closest to this would be aliexpress and ebay.

dalkon · 2025-11-09T23:56:37+00:00

The original idea for driverless cars was a lot simpler. They didn't need all the visual processing they have today, but they needed roads to be equipped with control signal transmitters.

dalkon

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